The whole meme started with Nick Carr's infamous Does IT Matter? editorial in the Harvard Business Review. He argued that while IT provided a competitive advantage in the past, it doesn't anymore. It's important for keeping up with the competition, but it will never put you ahead of the competition because it has been commoditized. All of his arguments made perfect sense at the time. And most IT organizations to date still take them to heart.
His arguments just assumed one thing incorrectly: they assumed that enterprise IT would never change in terms of the end user functionality it delivered. He assumed there was no more innovation to be had, that everything ever needed to be invented had been invented, and so we had reached the peak of functionality, like how you can't improve much upon the hammer and nail beyond perhaps the screw and electric power screwdriver.
Unfortunately, IT is treated like a commodity for most organizations, and commodities never get special attention.
